Recent reviews by DigitalLuvin

Do you like Project Zomboid... Then you'll love this! It's zomboid in 3D.. all of the interactivity, all of the craftiness.. all of the zombie fun..

This is one of the few games that gets my heart racing.. this is a bit more intense than Arizona Sunshine at 2am in a dark basement.. loads of fun and really polished for Early Access. It's alot of jump scares and will have you listening for footsteps.. one bite, that's all it takes! The crafting is deep and makes sense for most things - I think this will get alot of replayability.

There's a few bugs here and there - mainly visual, such as rain inside your RV type of stuff. But nothing game breaking.

I got about eighty hours into the game before it started getting repetitive, but the developers have introduced a variety of tweaks to make the game more challenging and I'm sure they'll have some more to come. I think the multiplayer Rust style gameplay will be where most people get their replayability from.. but solo isn't bad. There's a solid base game here with deep systems.

One thing to call out: It's $20 bucks at the time of this review.. but if you read the EA, it'll go up in price. I don't tend to recommend most people pick it up early, but this one makes sense for what's there. For a $20 sandbox.. (One days lunch) - it's already a pretty good deal. Honestly... I'm having more fun with it today than BF6 and less bugs..

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Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
“We intend to increase VEIN’s pricing over time as the game is developed.”
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Overall, I can't wait to see what this brings! The multiplayer seems to be more inline with what you would see with Rust, but solo is pure survival.

This was about as much fun as watching paint dry...

Way too many problems with this game.. seems like a dead game.

This is one that invokes some odd memories of legacy runescape or ultima, text based games.. or even PBEM games. The detail in the world is awesome and the freedom given to players to create worlds is quite nice.

I'm not sure what makes this work.. but games like Trove did not appeal to me where as this one has me interested. There's something that feels a bit like foxhole in the gameplay and cooperation required by a community... maybe not fully fleshed out, but I could really see this being a challenger to something like Anvil Empires, if the developers take in the right direction.

Right now, its a grindy crafter with an interesting world, nice building mechanics and a relatively balanced economy.

It's early, but I really did enjoy this one. If you like korean grinders and old school runescape... or something like Anvil Empires - you might like this one.


It's early access.. features are missing, undesigned or incomplete. This is a sandbox game where players can trade items to gain power, so it will likely have alot of issues with bots, gold traders, etc.. I haven't seen anything about how they plan to address this, so it seems to be a risk there and as this game pulls alot from ArcheAge, where the launch was atrocious with this problem, it seems like they could be heading for the same mistake.

It's quite braindead button mashing... make sure you don't think there is any form of total war or strategy to this game.

You simply run around the map as a one man army saving the other officers.

For me, this became repetitive very quickly.. I would advise understanding the series and not mistaking it for a strategy game or the middle earth series.

This is just another cashgrab.. amazon games is worse than EA or Ubisoft.. They're making Trion look charitable.

The game is fun at times, but the matchmaking seems to be quite bad. It is always one side stomping the other.. it never seems balanced.

As an old school FPS player, even BF1942 did a better job matchmaking.. its quite bad.

It's not ready for prime time yet - give it a few months of patching.

Is it fun? It's different.. not awful, but jury is still out on how much I will enjoy the changes into the future.

This has a negative review due to the poor state of the game on launch - if I pay $70 for something, it shouldn't be this buggy and Take-Two has increased their share price by 130% over the last five years. If you can reap 130% gains.. you can produce at least an 80% complete game on launch - this is just an example of Take-Two being greedy and rushing the developers.

It feels rushed and many of the features are confusing to long time fans of the series. I think most of this would not be an issue if they didn't have such a buggy UI where you aren't sure if the issue you're facing is a bug or just a change in features from the series.

It plays very differently than the previous series - make sure you watch some videos around it.



User Interface: Just trash.. non-intuitive, confusing.. feels like it was heavily geared towards console users. Highlighting units is awful.. hope you don't have myopia.

Game Map: The visuals on the map are pretty bad as they went with the 3D map, but units fall in the holes in clay pits, bombers flash like a neon sign at times for no reason, lots of visual and odd issues. It really kills any immersion you may be lucky enough to get. It feels like they went big and just simply couldn't pull it off. Expect some future patching here on ground collision.

Railroads: Visuals are heavily broken - odd tracks.. sometimes they are appear.. sometimes they don't. It's not intuitive as to why they appear or do not appear. The rail stations are basically airlifts - so it duplicates some of that behavior.

Combat Balance: So much cheese here. I'm sure it will get balanced, but man.. its easy to cheese and stack bonuses. Spiffy Brit has a good example of the Romans cheesing the +2 combat bonus. But pretty much every leader has something that can be exploited heavily to just crush the AI.

Leader Balance: Same issue as combat.. its new and not very well balanced. You can do some stupid things right now with a few of the leaders. It's great for achievements.

Diplomacy: It's different in some good and bad ways.. It does force you to think about the resource. I'm thinking this is a balance issue as well which will improve over time.



There are some improvements to this series and a few notable ones are the late game changes.

1) Modern Era seems to move a little faster and be less of a boring grind where you know you will win, especially in military victories.

2) Building the Ivy Bomb is pretty good for a military victory, it saves the long slog of steamrolling the AI once you get ahead.

3) WMD: I'm not sure if this is a feature as it wasn't mentioned in the encyclopedia (many features aren't described there) but for each nuke you drop, it seems to add a -1 modifier to your combat ability. This makes carpet bombing with nukes much harder to pull off in a long war. It's a pretty good balance feature as you can only drop one or two before the hate from society makes your tanks into paper.

4) Space Race: This take a bit more effort.. its still mildly boring, but now its a bit harder to mass product and rush the space race.

5) Factories: For all the confusion and oddness around them - I do like that they add a resource slot and balance out resources a bit in end game. However, I still always end up with a pool of leftover resources that are not used. This seems like a resource distribution issue in the standard game modes.. They'll likely balance that out in a few months.


Wait a few months unless you enjoy playing a beta.


It's still very much broken balance wise. Many of the UI bugs have been fixed and the factory / resource behavior seems much better.

Gameplay wise - the AI is doing very dumb things with forward building and it seems quite broken.

The arbitration agreement is also forcing you to use their arbiter and give up your legal rights.


The UI has been significantly improved and its far easier to get things done. Visual fidelity is better.. you can see what is selected and icons fall through the map far less.

The AI feels a bit more balanced and the archaeologists no longer dogpile on a single tile - so seems a little better there.

At this point, its pretty decent and doesn't seem worse than the previous in the series. They've made improvements to the era transitions and offering different modes, but that seems more of a gimmick to a bad design.

If you catch it on sale, I would recommend giving it a try. I wouldn't pay the full $70 retail for it.

It's a classic!

Very original and I'm surprised no one has cloned this to make a buck.. overall it's a solid experience.

This really has been one of the greatest evolution's of a game. It's massive now and touches on all the right areas for an explorer of galactic proportions.

I suspect they've built one of the best game engines out there behind the scenes, so I'm looking forward to seeing what else they can come up with...

Overall - this game is amazing with gorgeous graphics, interesting systems, even a decent story now. It started as hot garbage, but the development team kept cranking out updates until it was a masterpiece.

One of the few teams I would trust to see it through on a game.